


flesh and bones

by queenofthestarrrs



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: F/M, SHIELD, The Tragic Inevitability of Howard/Peggy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 18:50:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3144782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofthestarrrs/pseuds/queenofthestarrrs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Flesh, blood, bone--the body is only a container for who we truly are inside.” </p><p>― Megan Shepherd, <i>Her Dark Curiosity</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	flesh and bones

They’re not entirely sure what they’re doing here.

 

The loft that Howard purchased is draft and cold and covered with thick layers of dust and sits on the wrong side of the tracks. The desks are old and dingy and some of them creak and crack and strain whenever anyone leans on them. Their guns are few and scuffed and almost thirty years old, mostly private firearms that the agents brought with them.

Said agents? Well, there’s only a handful of them, abdicates from the SSR, friends they knew in the war, recruits from some of the top schools in the country that Howard swayed with the idea of fame and fortune, and they’ve all gone home for the day.

 

Now it’s only the two of them.

 

Howard rolls up his sleeves, puts on an Ella Fitzgerald album, and the two of them try to go to work as the city that never sleeps brussels underneath them, blissfully unaware. Peggy sweeps the floorboards, buffs them, polishes them. Howard scrubs windows and hangs heavy French drapes from all the windows. They struggle to push and carry desks, lining them up one by one. They pull glass lamps, typewriters, pads of paper and pencils out of cardboard boxes, and distribute them evenly between their phantom crew. Howard tries to sing, loudly and off pitch, and it’s the most comforting thing Peggy’s heard all week.

 

Howard insists on hanging up the pictures, or at least that’s what he’ll tell Colonel Phillips the next morning. There’s quite a few of them, one of the Howling Commandos, one of Barnes and Rogers, one of the two of them, brighten eyed and genuinely thrilled a few weeks after arriving specialized training at the SSR, hung in mismatched frames that Peggy suspected he bought at the thrift store three blocks down.

 

“A reminder,” he says quietly as he puffs away on a Lucky Strike. He’s leaning on his desk which strains underneath. His name plate, DIRECTOR STARK, glints under the bare fluorescent bulbs. “Of the reasons why we’re doing this. Of simpler times.”

 

“That’s a strange thing to hear from a man who Time Magazine said ‘blazed the future himself.’” She pulls the drapes closed, shivering and choking on the dust she disturbed.

 

Howard shrugs off his jacket, rises, and places it around her shoulders. “Back then, we were the good guys, and anyone wearing a swastika on their arm was a bad guy. It was black and white. It was clear. Now, I wouldn’t be able to pick the good guys from the bad guys if you gave me a line-up.”

 

“That scares you, doesn’t it?” She asked as she hung his jacket off the back of one chairs.

 

“Like hell.” Smokes weaves its way around his head. She’s suddenly hyper aware of the gray gathered around his temple. They are no longer young men. “How am I supposed to protect the world when I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be protecting it from?”

 

She cocks an eyebrow. “It’s not that.”

 

“Oh, so you’re trying to tell me what I am and aren’t afraid of now?” His words are angry and accusing and harsh, but his tone was light and playful. He smiles, and he almost looks like the man Peggy met almost thirty years ago. It’s dazzling.

 

“I know you better than you know yourself, Howard.” She smiles at him and plucks the cigarette out of his mouth. She stubs it out on the desk next to them. It belongs to a recent Yale grad. Thomas was his name, studied political science, graduated top of his class. She doesn’t think he’ll notice.

 

“You always were the only one, Pegs,” he tells and leans in close. She almost believes him, and her heart almost aches because of it.

 

“It scares you,” she puts her hand on his chest. “It scares you to think that, unlike your math and your science and your technology, people are just people. They aren’t black and white. They aren’t easily shoved into categories like good and bad, saint and sinner.”

“You’re wrong for once,” he whispers. His breath smells like tobacco and coffee. His hand is heavy and warm when it settles on her face. His wedding band cuts into her cheek, but for some reason she can’t seem to mind. Maria and Gabe and the children they have between the two of them seem to be so far away, so distant from this drafty loft in the Bronx.

 

“I’m wrong?”

 

“Steve was all good. Steve was a better person than every single one of us all put together. He fit into the box.”

 

“I suppose I’m wrong,” she notes melancholically. He rubs little circles on her face with a dry thumb.

 

“He would be proud of you, proud of everything you did. You accomplished, are accomplishing, so much more than you give yourself credit for. You, you Margaret Carter, built SHIELD from the ground up. Phillips and I, we’re just along for the ride.”

 

Her eyes are brimming with tears, and she can barely choke out the words. “Damn right, Howard.”

 

“He loved you.” Howard sobers and pulls her closer until their bodies are pressed together. His breathing is heavy. “He loved you wholly and completely and perfectly. He worshiped the ground you walked on. But, darling, I loved you first.”

 

She gulps. He seems so honest, so open, and something like nostalgia grabs at her throat. “It’s been a very long time since I was your darling.”

 

“Too long.” He licks his lips. “Would you mind if I kissed you?”

 

He doesn’t wait for answer. His lips are chapped and splitting and completely incessant, and her body immediately falls into a rhythm she hasn’t engaged in for years.

 

Kissing Howard isn’t like kissing Gabe or Steve. Steve was kind and gentle, a man afraid of his own strength. Even on the brink of possible death, he acted as if she had been made of glass. Gabe loved her deeply as only an academic could. He had read of great adventures and all consuming love. but he left all of his back in ‘45. Kissing Howard was playing with fire or doing drugs, dangerous and completely addicting.

 

She pulled back, the space between them thick. “Do you remember Betty Carver?”

 

“The character from that horrendous Captain America radio show?” Howard’s eyes were hooded. His lips were swollen. His hands were dripping down past the small of her back onto the curve of her ass. He looked mildly annoyed.

 

“Yes, you know I despised her when I was younger. I resented her. I nearly broke the radio during the last episode, nearly screamed. She married him. The fake Captain America, that is. She marries him and has his children and lives out the rest of her pathetic life in perfection. I was so angry.” She was shaking. “Her life was never complicated, never tragic.”

 

He peppers her collarbone with little kisses that are so tender she wants to cry.

 

“Is that what you wanted, Peggy?” He sighed. “Did you want to be someone’s housewife? If he’d asked, if I had asked, if Gabe would have asked, would you have quit doing this?”

 

She looks at the wall filled with photos, at the thick French drapes, at the bare bulbs and glass lamps, at the typewriters and nicked desks. This disastrous little room is where they were going to save the world or die trying.

 

“No.”

  
She’s absolutely sure what they’re doing here.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr (@shehulkings) and watch me cry about these two a lot.


End file.
